As Russell continued to speak, Rose continued to stare at him flatly, wondering if he had even listened to a word she had said. Well, it was clear that he had listened, but it wasn’t clear if he had engaged his brain even the littlest, tiniest bit. No, it was clear. It was clear that he hadn’t. What did Marissa even see in this idiot, anyway? Or Holland? Well okay, Holland saw him as a pet project and Rose would give them that but she’d thought that Marissa at least required some basic sentience from people around her. It had been a tough year for Marissa, though, and they’d both let Ruben fake them out for a bit. Maybe it was the same thing.

As if to punish Russell for his head being apparently entirely vacant, a billywig popped up out of nowhere and stung him on the neck. It also provided Rose an excellent change to prove her point, which she took gladly by pulling her wand out and jabbing towards the billywig, muttering a spell crisply under her breath. A net appeared at speed out of the end of her wand, expanding as it moved until it was large enough to encompass an entire billywig, which it did promptly. The net, with billywig, plopped to the ground. Smugly, Rose bent over and scooped it up.

“Okay firstly,” Rose began, raising one hand and gesturing towards Russell with her index finger. “It’s not like we’re running madly about the greenhouse yelling ‘billywigs come here’ or anything, we’re going to create a net and run it through the air. Like you do when you’re trying to catch fish in a fish tank.” She didn’t have the most experience with fish tanks, aside from some poorly thought-out experiments in pet ownership as a small child (Rose’s mother had decided that having a fish might help Rose adjust to having a brother) (fortunately, Connor had yet to meet quite the end the fish had), but she’d had enough experience to know that when you were trying to catch a fish in a fish net, you didn’t randomly swing it around the plants, you swooped it around where the fish was. And since they were going to use magical nets created with wands to catch magical bugs, Rose figured they’d have a good deal more precision than with a fish net.

“Secondly,” she continued “nets aren’t complicated. They’re literally the opposite of complicated.” In an effort to remain cordial, Rose neglected to comment on her thoughts as to the eventual fate of people who found things like nets complicated. “Or can you not do conjuration?” was the next thing that came out of her mouth, slightly less condescendingly than she meant it.

Russell, who had already been feeling significantly less energized than the riled-up foliage around them, wilted even further at her snapped response. It was somewhat surprising (a good type of... more

Painfully aware, now literally, that Professor Bennett had instructed them not to cause any harm to the bugs, Russell had to fight to keep his hands at his side. It was hard to fight the automatic... more

Probably for the purposes of showing that he wasn’t utterly useless, Russell conjured some ice and held it against his neck. Rose raised her eyebrows. Her billywig sting didn’t feel like it required... more